Tag: Economic Growth

Must-Read: Nell Abernathy, Mike Konczal, and Kathryn Milani: How to Check Corporate, Financial, and Monopoly Power

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Nell Abernathy, Mike Konczal, and Kathryn Milani: How to Check Corporate, Financial, and Monopoly Power: “The policies we propose specifically address rules that have distorted private sector behavior and provided benefits to multinational corporations and rich individuals at the expense of average workers and the economy…

…If taxed and regulated properly, big business, banks, and wealth-holders can contribute to broadly shared prosperity. But tailoring the rules to serve their interests—in essence, leaving these powerful forces untamed—promotes rent-seeking and greater inequality and leads to weaker long-term growth and a less productive economy. Untamed builds on recent analysis of economic inequality and on our 2015 report, Rewriting the Rules, in which we argued that changes to the rules of trade, corporate governance, tax policy, monetary policy, and financial regulations are key drivers of growing inequality…

Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Technology Is Changing How We Live

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Technology Is Changing How We Live: “But it needs to change how we work…

…The closest the economics profession has to a measure of technological progress is an indicator called total factor productivity, or TFP. It’s a bit of an odd concept: It measures the productivity gains left over after accounting for the growth of the workforce and capital investments. When TFP is rising, it means the same number of people, working with the same amount of land and machinery, are able to make more than they were before. It’s our best attempt to measure the hard-to-define bundle of innovations and improvements that keep living standards rising. It means we’re figuring out how to, in Steve Jobs’s famous formulation, work smarter. If TFP goes flat, then so do living standards. And TFP has gone flat — or at least flatter — in recent decades….

What Thiel can’t quite understand is why his fellow founders and venture capitalists can’t see what he sees, why they’re so damn optimistic and self-satisfied amidst an obvious, rolling disaster for human betterment…. Thiel’s peers in Silicon Valley have a different, simpler explanation. To many of them, the numbers are simply wrong…. Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, is… a skeptic. ‘The question is whether [productivity] is measuring the wrong things,’ he told me. Bill Gates agrees. During our conversation, he rattled off a few of the ways our lives have been improved in recent years — digital photos, easier hotel booking, cheap GPS, nearly costless communication with friends. ‘The way the productivity figures are done isn’t very good at capturing those quality of service–type improvements,’ he said.

There’s much to be said for this argument. Measures of productivity are based on the sum total of goods and services the economy produces for sale. But many digital-era products are given away for free, and so never have an opportunity to show themselves in GDP statistics. Take Google Maps. I have a crap sense of direction, so it’s no exaggeration to say Google Maps has changed my life. I would pay hundreds of dollars a year for the product. In practice, I pay nothing. In terms of its direct contribution to GDP, Google Maps boosts Google’s advertising business by feeding my data back to the company so they can target ads more effectively, and it probably boosts the amount of money I fork over to Verizon for my data plan. But that’s not worth hundreds of dollars to Google, or to the economy as a whole. The result is that GDP data might undercount the value of Google Maps in a way it didn’t undercount the value of, say, Garmin GPS devices. This, Varian argues, is a systemic problem with the way we measure GDP….

The gap between what I pay for Google Maps and the value I get from it is called ‘consumer surplus,’ and it’s Silicon Valley’s best defense against the grim story told by the productivity statistics. The argument is that we’ve broken our country’s productivity statistics because so many of our great new technologies are free or nearly free to the consumer. When Henry Ford began pumping out cars, people bought his cars, and so their value showed up in GDP. Depending on the day you check, the stock market routinely certifies Google — excuse me, Alphabet — as the world’s most valuable company, but few of us ever cut Larry Page or Sergei Brin a check…. The other problem the productivity skeptics bring up are so-called ‘step changes’ — new goods that represent such a massive change in human welfare that trying to account for them by measuring prices and inflation seems borderline ridiculous. The economist Diane Coyle puts this well. In 1836, she notes, Nathan Mayer Rothschild died from an abscessed tooth. ‘What might the richest man in the world at the time have paid for an antibiotic, if only they had been invented?’ Surely more than the actual cost of an antibiotic….

‘Yes, productivity numbers do miss innovation gains and quality improvements,’ sighs John Fernald, an economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank who has studied productivity statistics extensively. ‘But they’ve always been missing that.’… Consider Google Maps again. It’s true that using the app is free. But the productivity gains it enables should show in other parts of the economy. If we are getting places faster and more reliably, that should allow us to make more things, have more meetings, make more connections, create more value….

Perhaps the best way to value the digital age’s advances is by trying to put a price on the time we spend using things like Facebook. Syverson used extremely generous assumptions about the value of our time, and took as a given that we would use online services even if we had to pay for them. Even then, he found the consumer surplus only fills a third of the productivity gap…. A March paper from David Byrne, John Fernald, and Marshall Reinsdorf… comes to similar conclusions. ‘The major ‘cost’ to consumers of Facebook, Google, and the like is not the broadband access, the cell phone service, or the phone or computer; rather, it is the opportunity cost of time,’ they concluded. ‘But that time cost … is akin to the consumer surplus obtained from television (an old economy invention) or from playing soccer with one’s children.’…

There’s a simple explanation for the disconnect between how much it feels like technology has changed our lives and how absent it is from our economic data: It’s changing how we play and relax more than it’s changing how we work and produce. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias has written, ‘Digital technology has transformed a handful of industries in the media/entertainment space that occupy a mindshare that’s out of proportion to their overall economic importance. The robots aren’t taking our jobs; they’re taking our leisure’…

Must-Read: Nicholas Warino: The Bay Area Housing Crisis Is Caused by and Can Be Solved by Local Government

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Nicholas Warino: The Bay Area Housing Crisis Is Caused by and Can Be Solved by Local Government: “Professor Walker… presents some reasonable ideas and even some good policy solutions…

…(rent control, eviction controls, low-income public assistance, etc.) As far as I can tell, he’s on left, so I bet we’d agree on many issues. That said, Professor Walker’s analysis of the housing crisis is not good…. I’ll quote them directly and respond.

But while it’s true that we need to expand the region’s housing supply, building more housing cannot solve the problem as long as demand is out of control, as it is today. There is simply no way housing could have been built quickly enough to avoid the price spike of the current boom.

This is a common argument: building more housing will help, but we nevertheless ‘can’t build our way out of the problem.’ This is wrong in two ways: 1) The only way for demand to be ‘out of control’ is for demand to consistently outpace supply. So it’s logically true that ‘building more housing cannot solve the problem as long as demand is out of control’ because within that sentence is the assertion that demand will always be greater than supply. In other words, this paragraph is true in the same way ‘you cannot fix The Problem as long as The Problem still exists.’ True but meaningless.

2)…. The housing crisis problem is not a binary problem, where it either exists or doesn’t. The problem with out-of-balance supply-and-demand is a continuous pressure on the housing market…. Every single additional unit added to the housing market turns the valve and releases some pressure, leading to lower prices than would be the case if that unit had never been built.

Three basic forces are driving the Bay Area’s housing prices upward: growth, affluence, and inequality. Three other things make matters worse: finance, business cycles, and geography.

Other basic forces…. People, money, consciousness, the Sun, the lack of worldwide plagues, and the Big Bang…. ‘Growth’ and ‘affluence,’ which is to say people earning more money, which is to say ‘demand,’ is a part of the problem. Hence supply-and-demand. And yes, finance contributes to the problem, in the sense ‘finance’ means the flow of money throughout our economy and the Bay Area housing market is part of our economy. Geography? You bet… but luckily we’ve invented ways to build up, not just out…. But both building up and building out require a focus on BUILDING.

All of these operate on the demand side of the equation, and demand is the key to the runaway housing market.

There is always ‘demand’ in an economy, unless everyone is dead. The relevance of demand is how it relates to supply. Even if the total amount of demand for housing in the Bay Area is accelerating, it would not be a problem if the supply of housing was also accelerating…. Reminder: demand in an economy simply means the amount of money in the economy that wants to be spent on a good or service. Generally, one of the primary goals of a society is to increase how much money people have, so they have more money to demand things and pay other people who will have more money to demand other things. And so on. This is how societies–if they ALSO focus on the equally critical goals of equity, justice, and fairness–lift people out of poverty, increase happiness, increase the tax base for new public goods and services, and increase the amount of money that can be used for innovation and progress. When the demand in an economy increases, like you’re seeing in the Bay Area housing market, the healthy response from the market is to increase supply…

Must-Read: Edward Luce: The Mystery of Weak US Productivity

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Edward Luce: The Mystery of Weak US Productivity: “From your drone home delivery to that oncoming driverless car, change seems to be accelerating…

…Warren Buffett, the great investor, promises that our children’s generation will be the ‘luckiest crop in history’. Everywhere the world is speeding up except, that is, in the productivity numbers. This year, for the first time in more than 30 years, US productivity growth will almost certainly turn negative following a decade of sharp slowdown. Yet our Fitbits seem to be telling us otherwise. Which should we trust–the economic statistics or our own lying eyes?…

At just over 2 per cent, US trend growth is barely half the level it was a generation ago. As Paul Krugman put it: ‘Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.’ It is possible we are simply mismeasuring things… fail[ing] to capture the utility of setting up a Facebook profile, for example, or downloading free information from Wikipedia…. But recent studies–and common sense–say our iPhones chain us to our employers even when we are at leisure. We may thus be exaggerating productivity growth by undercounting how much we work. The latter certainly fits with the experience of most of the US labour force….

Most Americans have suffered from indifferent or declining wages in the past 15 years or so…. For the first time the next generation of US workers will be less educated than the previous, according to the OECD, which means worse is probably yet to come…. It is also possible we are on the cusp of a renaissance… reaping the benefit of artificial intelligence, personalised medicine or take your pick. This may better fit our own fevered imaginations. Or it could be a chimera. Until then, the US and most of the west are stuck with a deepening productivity crisis….

Imagine the US takes much the same course in the next ten years as it has over the last. That would mean a further corrosion of US infrastructure, continued relative decline in the quality of public education, and atrophying middle workforce skills. It would also hasten the breakaway of urban America’s most gilded enclaves, further enriching the educated elites…. If you think Mr Trump’s rise is ominous, picture America after another decade like the last. Which brings me to the remedy: a universal basic income…. Today’s stagnation may be temporary or lasting. We have no way of telling. Common sense dictates we must act as though it is here to stay.

Must-Read: Jay Shambaugh: Why the United States Needs the World to Grow

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Jay Shambaugh: Why the United States Needs the World to Grow: “Looking forward, we need to take demand seriously and we need to take productivity growth seriously…

…and we need to see the links…. It seems highly unlikely that the trends from the past few years represent changes to economic fundamentals…. But we need to recognize that even years after the financial crisis the challenges and interconnections of the global economy look somewhat different that they normally do—which is why a concerted, truly global effort to lift growth is still needed.

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America

Posted on by Brad DeLong
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Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America: “‘Concrete Economics,’ by University of California-Berkeley professors Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen, needs an expanded sequel…

…900 pages long, with charts, data, theory and an exhaustive list of historical case studies. That book would become the Bible of the New Industrialist movement that is just beginning to grope its way out of the ashes of the neoliberal free-market consensus. Perhaps that tome will get written. But DeLong and Cohen couldn’t wait to write it, because we need new ideas now, and they decided they had to put a sketch of those new ideas into people’s heads very quickly. And I agree with their decision. If you’re at all concerned about economic policy, this is a book you need to read. It will take you only a couple of hours, and the time will be well-spent….

The peril of this sort of historical analysis is that it’s always easy to make the past fit some pattern after the fact. Sometimes policy causes big economic shifts, and sometimes it’s just along for the ride. A cautionary tale is provided by Japan’s experience, which DeLong and Cohen extol. Although Japan’s government certainly did try to pick winners — and still does — this probably stopped working around the late 1970s. For a good primer on how Japan’s industrial policy petered out, see ‘Can Japan Compete?,’ by Michael Porter, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara. Nor have South Korea and China, for all their fast growth, yet managed to reach the income levels of the finance-ridden U.S….

DeLong and Cohen are absolutely right — the American mind has been far too captured by the beguilingly simple and powerful theory of free-market dogma. That theory was oversold, and we need a corrective…. DeLong and Cohen don’t focus on elevating… theories…. DeLong and Cohen propose to frame economic policy programs in terms of simple, tangible, objectives. Build railroads across the West. Break up monopolies. Fund Big Science…. This short, almost casually sketched book is really the opening shot in a long campaign… to build a New Industrialism–an approach to economic policy that respects the power of the private sector but isn’t afraid of an activist government. No one quite knows what New Industrialism is going to be yet. ‘Concrete Economics’ is meant to get people thinking about what it ought to be.

Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics Is Out!

Posted on by Brad DeLong
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“Live Long and Prosper” Blogging…: Manu Saadia: Trekonomics http://amzn.to/20ZqMdG (San Francisco: Piper Text: 941758754): Forward by J. Bradford DeLong:

‘Live long and prosper.’

‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.’

‘Fascinating.’

‘Make it so.’

‘Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.’

‘I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer.’

‘Highly illogical.’

‘You can stop it!’ ‘Stop it? I’m counting on it!’

Over the past century Star Trek has woven itself into our socio-cultural DNA. It provides a set of cultural reference points to powerful ideas, striking ideas, beneficial ideas that help us here in our civilization think better–even those of us who are economists.

Why should the imaginary dreams of science fiction help us think better? Let me get at this by telling you some very short stories–some true, some false. True: Back in 1759 when the man who was to be the first economist, young Adam Smith, Scottish moral philosopher on the make, told his readers something false: of:

a stranger to human nature [seeing] the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors… [concludes that] pain must be more agonizing, and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations…

You see what he did there?

There is no–not that we know of–such alien stranger.

Smith is telling us a very short science-fiction story.

Why? Because we love to tell one another false stories–to incessantly gossip about our imaginary friends. It is, like saving 15% or more on car insurance, what we do. If an alien intellect, vast and cool and unsympathetic (or vast and warm and sympathetic), were to scrutinize us from afar it would inevitably conclude that telling each other false stories is a major part of what we are, and it would wonder why we communicate–or miscommunicate–in this way.

You see what I did there?

The next Sigmund Freud–not an individual but a social psychologist–will say that our fictions are, collectively, the dream-work of the reasoning by the organism that is the anthology intelligence that is humanity. Everyone gossips about their imaginary friends. And we dream these dreams to amuse ourselves, but also so that we will be more sane when we awake.

The Prime Directive of ‘Star Trek: TOS’ is primarily a way to process America’s 1960s misadventure in Vietnam. Would that more generals and chickenhawks dreamed dreams that taught them of the limits of foresight and calculation, the surprising nature of war, and the unlikelihood of success if you start by breaking things! I first recognized that ‘Star Trek’ was a very different kind of show back in the 1960s when, at the end of the episode ‘Arena’, Kirk neither kills nor civilizes the Gorn, but lets him go to make his own destiny.

Gene Roddenberry mostly wanted to find a way to get people to pay him to make up stories, so that we wouldn’t have to take a job that required a lot of heavy lifting. But he also wanted to tell particular stories. The stories he wanted to tell were those that would be the dreamwork for a better future:

  • He wanted to tell stories of a progressive humanity.
  • He wanted to tell stories about people in a better future in which governmental institutions were smart enough to stay out of Vietnam and people weren’t obsessed with leaky roofs and food shortages.
  • He wanted to tell stories in which racial prejudice was as silly and stupid as it, in fact, is.
  • He wanted to tell stories in which it would be normal for a woman to be if not #1 at least #2 as first officer of a starship.
  • He wanted to tell stories in which everyone–even the Red Shirts–was an officer, a trained and well-educated professional treated with dignity and respect by their peers and superiors.

And Gene Roddenberry’s successors as showrunners, writers, actors, set designers, and all the rest took on the same project: do the dreamwork of a better future. North Atlantic civilization bobbled the historical opportunity that was the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Deep Space 9 point to better directions. Gene Roddenberry put into Star Trek DNA making it, in large part, a collective dreaming about a better future, and not just a western or a medieval romance with spectacular elements in the form of whooshing spaceships and exploding planets bolted onto it.

But ‘economics’?

Today in our restricted bubble the public health problems related to food are no longer predominantly problems of malnutrition and calorie-scarcity but of overabundance: dealing with salt, triglycerides, and carbohydrate overload. This is a new thing for humanity. 400 years ago, in almost all human societies, if you weren’t rich you were malnourished: not getting the nutrients for your immune system to function well, or the calories to reliably ovulate, probably losing a tooth with every baby. 400 years ago, in almost all human societies, if you weren’t rich you were short. The orphans sent to sea by the charity that was the Marine Society were seven inches shorter than the aristocrats’ sons sent to Sandhurst to become army officers. And it is not just in food that those of us in the bubble have abundance: we look around and want, not more stuff, but rather less stuff that is the right particular stuff for us. The dreams that are Roddenberry’s ‘Star Trek’ are part of thinking through what it would be like to have a society of abundance, of logic and reason, and of inclusion–one in which the Gorn might really be the good guy from his perspective, and in which, as Ayelborne forecasts in ‘Errand of Mercy’: ‘You and the Klingons will become fast friends. You will work together…’

For those of us who are fans, it has been and is a wild nearly fifty-year ride. And even those of us who are dedicated fans need, by now, a road map.

So with enthusiasm and admiration, I present to you Manu Saadia, and Trekonomics.

Must-Read: Wired: The Economic Lessons of Star Trek’s Money-Free Society

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Wired: The Economic Lessons of Star Trek’s Money-Free Society: “Manu Saadia… went looking for a book about the economics of Star Trek…

…When he couldn’t find one, he decided to write his own. The result, Trekonomics, has drawn praise from economists such as Brad DeLong and Joshua Gans…. ‘It’s made clear and emphasized several times in the course of the show that the Federation does not have money,’ Saadia says in Episode 205 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. ‘You have Captain Picard saying, ‘We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.’’ Saadia is fascinated by the idea of a society in which material wealth has become so abundant that possessing it no longer holds any appeal. In such a world the only way to gain status would be by cultivating talent and intellect. ‘What really makes sense in the Star Trek universe and Star Trek society is to compete for reputation,’ he says. ‘What is not abundant in Star Trek’s universe is the captain’s chair.’

He points to technologies like GPS and the internet as models for how we can set ourselves on the path to a Star Trek future. ‘If we decide as a society to make more of these crucial things available to all as public goods, we’re probably going to be well on our way to improving the condition of everybody on Earth,’ he says. But he also warns that technology alone won’t create a post-scarcity future. If we’re not careful we could end up like the greedy Ferengi, who charge money for the use of their replicators rather than making them available to everyone. ‘This is not something that will be solved by more gizmos or more iPhones,’ Saadia says. ‘This is something that has to be dealt with on a political level, and we have to face that.’

Listen to our complete interview with Manu Saadia in Episode 205 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy….

Manu Saadia on Isaac Asimov:

In 1941 he publishes his first story about robots and his great idea and insight is that the robots are not going to be our enemies or our doom as a society, the way robots were usually portrayed, as Frankensteins. The robots will liberate us, and so Asimov is trying to figure out a world where human labor is no longer necessary for survival. And that is something you see throughout Star Trek, much more so in The Next Generation than in the original series. In The Next Generation you have these incredible machines that will make anything for you on the spot and on demand—the replicators—and in a way the replicator is a metaphor for universal automation the way it is described in Asimov’s robot stories.

Manu Saadia on Star Trek characters:

They are consistent with the economic circumstances in which they live. Imagine yourself growing up in a society where there is never any want or need or financial insecurity of any sort. You will be a very different person. You will be absolutely uninterested in conspicuous consumption.… You will probably be interested in things of a higher nature—the cultivation of the mind, education, love, art, and discovery. And so these people are very stoic in that sense, because they have no worldly interests that we today could relate to. … I usually say that they’re all aliens, in a way. My friend Chris [Black], who wrote on the show, said it was really hard for the writers, because it’s a workplace drama, but there’s no drama.

Manu Saadia on the Ferengi:

I love the Ferengi because they are sort of a parody of the 1990s or 2000s American acquisitive businessman. … The Ferengi are really ignoble, really awful people, and they’re really funny as a result. But they do change over time. When you watch the whole arc of the Ferengi in Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi, just by contact with the Federation, become more like the Federation, they become Keynesian social democrats, by the end. Suddenly you have the right to have unions and strikes, and there’s health care for everybody. … I always thought that this story of the Ferengi becoming more humanitarian just by contact with the Federation was a metaphor for all of us becoming better by watching Star Trek.

Manu Saadia on the Borg:

The Borg are such great villains because they’re so similar to the Federation, when you think about it. The Borg have perfect allocation of goods, and supply and demand, and everybody is connected to everybody in the beehive, and they just seem to be extremely efficient. They’re also the other society in Star Trek that could be characterized as ‘post-scarcity.’ Any Borg drone never wants or needs anything, it’s always provided by the Collective. So it is the mirror image—and the dangerous image, almost—of what a society that is both redistributive and satiated could look like. It’s almost as if the writers tried to incorporate the criticism of the society they propose.

Must-Read: Branko Milanovic: How Unequal Is India?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Branko Milanovic: How unequal is India?: “In the 1990s… the survey numbers began to diverge more and more from National Accounts statistics…

…NSS kept on producing a fairly stable consumption Gini… with only a small increase in inequality after India’s sharp turn toward capitalism in the early 1990s… made India inequality look about the same as in developed countries. But until recently we had no other reliable and nationally-representative survey to confront NSS with. Now… we have… the first income based surveys of Indian population for 2004 and, just released by LIS, another same survey for 2011…. First, Indian Gini is… 51… the level of Latin American countries and is some 15 points… higher than… NSS….

Now, if we replace NSS with the new income survey as I have done for the global inequality calculation for the year 2011 (unpublished), you may expect that the greater inequality revealed by IHDS would push global inequality up, especially since India is such a populous country. Right? Wrong…. Global inequality goes down by approximately 1 Gini point since the higher income levels implied by IHDS push Indians toward the middle of the global income distribution and more than offset the contribution to higher global inequality that comes from the stretched-out Indian distribution…. In conclusion, more unequal but richer India, makes the world more equal.

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America: “‘Concrete Economics,’ by University of California-Berkeley professors Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen, needs an expanded sequel…

…900 pages long, with charts, data, theory and an exhaustive list of historical case studies. That book would become the Bible of the New Industrialist movement that is just beginning to grope its way out of the ashes of the neoliberal free-market consensus. Perhaps that tome will get written. But DeLong and Cohen couldn’t wait to write it, because we need new ideas now, and they decided they had to put a sketch of those new ideas into people’s heads very quickly. And I agree with their decision. If you’re at all concerned about economic policy, this is a book you need to read. It will take you only a couple of hours, and the time will be well-spent….

The peril of this sort of historical analysis is that it’s always easy to make the past fit some pattern after the fact. Sometimes policy causes big economic shifts, and sometimes it’s just along for the ride. A cautionary tale is provided by Japan’s experience, which DeLong and Cohen extol. Although Japan’s government certainly did try to pick winners — and still does — this probably stopped working around the late 1970s. For a good primer on how Japan’s industrial policy petered out, see ‘Can Japan Compete?,’ by Michael Porter, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara. Nor have South Korea and China, for all their fast growth, yet managed to reach the income levels of the finance-ridden U.S….

DeLong and Cohen are absolutely right — the American mind has been far too captured by the beguilingly simple and powerful theory of free-market dogma. That theory was oversold, and we need a corrective…. DeLong and Cohen don’t focus on elevating… theories…. DeLong and Cohen propose to frame economic policy programs in terms of simple, tangible, objectives. Build railroads across the West. Break up monopolies. Fund Big Science…. This short, almost casually sketched book is really the opening shot in a long campaign… to build a New Industrialism–an approach to economic policy that respects the power of the private sector but isn’t afraid of an activist government. No one quite knows what New Industrialism is going to be yet. ‘Concrete Economics’ is meant to get people thinking about what it ought to be.